James Shields

Ataxaria the mother of all States.

You think you can offend me? Bro, I got so high one time I roasted myself for a full hour straight. Said shit to myself I’m still emotionally recovering from. I’m not okay.

When science says, “This has an 80% probability,” most people focus on the 80%. I’m calculating the 20%. Tell me where it fails.

We do not experience reality directly. We experience reality through the organization of the living system perceiving it. Change the organization, and you may change the accessible world.

I’m a thinker. I treat thinking like an athlete treats practice drills. Like a mechanic rebuilding an old ’67 Mustang. Like an artist staring at a blank canvas. Thinking is where I seriously play.

Who’s trying to play a fun texting game with me? The goal is simple: We can only respond with gifs. No words. But it still has to make sense. A full-blown conversation… strictly through gifs. 😈

Life will always exceed prediction. That is why I do not disqualify spirituality. To claim the spiritual is impossible, you would have to know the universe completely. And to know the universe completely, you would have to become the very God you denied.

Attention is love. Qualitative attention is devotion. “I noticed you & I gave myself to the noticing.”

I’ll give y’all my biggest secret to confidence. It doesn’t matter if you’re shy, anxious, insecure, or whatever. The secret is…Self-amusement. “If I have to do something, I might as well have fun doing it.” Anxious at a meeting? find a way to make it fun. Maybe crack a joke about it or use it as a character development arc. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Turn the situation to your advantage and have fun.

@andrew_nfx The beauty of trading, although technical it’s an art. I do best when I’m consistently trading. Like throwing jabs I got to throw some, take some to feel the market.

Your A+ setup probably appears 2-3 times a week Yet you're taking 20-30 trades a week and wondering why you're still broke

Ayoo, I’m a savage. Nobody is outworking me right now. Every day, 10+ hours. Writing the book. Building the app. Developing systems. And still doing my morning yoga and workouts. (Alright I might be slacking a wee bit on this lol.) Up at 6 AM. Executing until late at night. Day after day. Week after week. And somehow I’m hitting the gas harder. I’m not letting up. I’m locked in, baby.

Yo, my brain is braining right now. Processing feels up. I’m watching videos on 2x Focus is dialed in. Word recall is sharper than a Gillette Mach Fusion. I can move between philosophy, jokes, systems language, casual conversation, and deeper thought way faster than usual. The days before this, I was deep in coding, organizing logic, structuring systems, and doing the boring mechanical work where your brain has to track what connects to what. Then long-form reading and book-writing lit the track up. I’m talking hours with a book. Long-form reading forced my mind to stay with structure, language, meaning, and continuity. Then writing forced me to retrieve, connect, compress, and articulate. A few days later, I still feel the effect. Cleaner retrieval. Better articulation. More range. More control. So yeah. Read a book, maybe code some shit and write to train your brain.

If your candle can light someone else’s, that’s dope as fuck.

Last night at a party, I told a friend I’d smoke a cigar with him. Forty minutes passed. The party entered that strange hour where “nice weather” becomes the main event. That’s usually my cue to go. So I said my farewells. “Alright man, I gotta go.” He looked at me and said: “What happened to the cigar?” “We’ll do it another day. I got work to attend to.” Then he laughed a little and said: “You know… this focus of yours is a little too much.” I said: “I know. I’m a fanatic. Intensely focused. It can be a problem sometimes.” But man, if you were building what I’m building, you’d feel the excitement I do.

People party. People get drunk. People be getting litty. Meanwhile I’m over here building a risk model for altered states because every cannabis + psychosis conversation I’ve seen misses the actual variable. Everyone measures intake. The deeper variable is salience load vs. regulation capacity. Drift Risk: Dᵣ = (P · Q · O · T · S) / (F · A · G · C · R) Numerator → Potency · Quantity · Onset speed · Duration · State sensitivity Denominator → Focus control · Aperture · Grounding · Critical thinking · Return capacity In simple terms: Risk increases when the intensity of meaning entering consciousness exceeds the mind’s ability to regulate, filter, reality test, and return to baseline. The steering wheel matters just as much as the engine. Nerd behavior. I know.

You know those random memories that pop into your head and have you cracking up for no reason? At my uncle’s house, we had four pairs of 16oz boxing gloves. We did not use them like normal children with parental supervision. We split into teams and whipped them at each other’s heads, full warthrough the living room, hallways, outside. No rules. No refs. No adults. You’d hear the glove fly past your ear. Whoooosh. Then “oh shit”. THUD. Straight into the wall. We had steam cannons for arms. Diving behind couches. Peeking around corners. Launching gloves like a low budget war movie with no stunt coordinator. And every now and then… you’d hear a different sound. Not a thud. Not a couch. Not “Aight, chill!” Just that one clean, terrible sound. Shatter. Everybody froze. Same face. The universal kid face of: “We have entered ass whooping territory.” Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Five guilty children standing there like the window committed suicide. Let’s just say my uncle had the best airflow in the neighborhood. Not by design. By cousins with cannon arms and a score to settle. 😂 Good times.

Last night at a party, I told a friend I’d smoke a cigar with him. Forty minutes passed. The party entered that strange hour where “nice weather” becomes the main event. That’s usually my cue to go. So I said my farewells. “Alright man, I gotta go.” He looked at me and said: “What happened to the cigar?” “We’ll do it another day. I got work to attend to.” Then he laughed a little and said: “You know… this focus of yours is a little too much.” I said: “I know. I’m a fanatic. Intensely focused. It can be a problem sometimes.” But man, if you were building what I’m building, you’d feel the excitement I do.

I have so much passion coursing through my veins that the other day I found myself screaming while driving. I do this often. Not at someone. It is just intensity. Without my daily disciplines, my business, my books, and a purpose strong enough to channel it through, that fire would turn back on me. It would burn inward. Consume the man carrying it. I have two sayings that capture it perfectly: Any obstacle in my path will be steamrolled. I’ll light myself on fire to be the light in the dark. Purpose is not a dead word to me. It is alive.

The system improves by measuring reality, then measuring the measurer.